


Chiaroscuro

by asktheravens



Series: Everybody Lives AU [1]
Category: Thor (Movies) RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Italian Renaissance, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-30
Updated: 2014-07-30
Packaged: 2018-02-11 00:59:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2047077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asktheravens/pseuds/asktheravens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tomasso, nephew of Lorenzo di Medici, and Christoforo, a bastard son of the notorious Borgia family, carry on an illicit relationship until they get caught up in the violent politics of the day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MartyMc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MartyMc/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Start Again](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1305346) by [asktheravens](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asktheravens/pseuds/asktheravens). 



> The first chapter of this was originally part of my previous story Start Again, but Marty wanted a version where they live. So here you go! I brought them back from the dead to further amuse myself with them, and if that doesn't make me a benevolent god I don't what does.

Christoforo woke to the scratching of his lover’s pen and a beam of warm sunlight across his eyes.He stole a moment to watch his poet at work. Tomas sat at the window, his unguarded face showing the progress of his thoughts.All he wore was Christo’s own shirt, too large on his lean frame; it gaped open unlaced at the neck and left his long, slender legs exposed.His other hand worked through his blonde curls without his conscious control, a sure sign he was deep in the throes of a lyrical battle.The golden morning sunlight suffused him with radiance, turning his hair and skin to gilt and cream.

“Aggh, Tomas, what are you doing?” he groaned and flung his arm over his eyes with pantomimed drama, as though he had just woken up.

“Writing,” he said in a mild tone.“You’d sleep until the sun set again, if I let you.”He set down his pen and smoothed his hair, then came to join Chris amid the damp, sex-scented wreckage of the bedclothes.  

“As if it weren’t you who exhausted me,” he teased.He caught Tomas’ hands as he sat on the bed and drew him into a kiss.

“I didn’t hear you complaining last night,” he kissed back and Christo took the opportunity to get his hands in Tomas’ curls.He usually covered them up and hated to look messy, but Chris went crazy for his hair.

“I heard you plenty.Did God answer your prayers?”Christo kissed down his lover’s long neck and followed the line of red and purple marks he’d left on Tomas’ collarbone, the ghostly trail of his own lips and teeth.

“Once or twice.Stop it, that stings!” he gave Christo a playful swat.“You should pray my clothes cover them, you animal.”But there was no anger in his voice; no one would challenge a Medici, not even the gentle, scholarly runt of the litter.It didn’t seem possible that even God could keep the rumors from reaching Lorenzo that his cherubic nephew was no longer the angel he so resembled, defiled at the hands of an illegitimate Borgia.

“I’d rather hear you pray some more, my love.You do it so nicely.”Christo did not stop kissing him.His hands rucked up the shirt as they roamed, baring Tomas’ slender waist and the bit of baby fat at his belly that he craved to touch.Last night they had come together like Judgement Day, desperate to make up for the time they had to spend apart, but this morning he would take his time.

“Oh no…oh stop it…” Tomas sighed, but his arms found their way around Christo and his fingers twined in the unfashionable length of his hair.“I’m already late…I’m supposed to meet my uncles at the Duomo and I’ll never…”

“Don’t go,” he paused his kisses but parted Tomas’ thighs with his knee.He bent his lips to Tomas’ ear and spoke, as low and enticing as he could. “You’ll be in Confession for hours after last night, and that’s just to cover what you said.Tell me what you were writing instead.”

“A poem…A sonnet,” he said.He straddled Christoforo and slid into his arms, hard against his bare stomach.He tilted his head back so he could have his throat kissed.

“Is it about me?” He obliged his poet, held him close and placed gentle, sucking kisses down the hollow of his neck.

“You think I could contain you in a mere fourteen lines?”

“I think you would try.”

“I would need a whole poem just to praise the feel of your lips, and another for the color of your eyes.”The skin of his thighs slid cool against Christo’s hips and his cock brushed Tomas’ buttocks with each shift.

“I think I’d like to hear that.What about this?”He slid one of his hands free of the shirt and guided Tomas’ fingers to his cock and shuddered as they gripped him.

“Hmmm…a whole book, I think, on how I feel about this,” he stroked him, teasing.“And maybe a second, an epic to cover all the things it can do.”

“Another Divine Comedy?”

“Just the  _Paradiso_ ,” he murmured.“Dante had his Beatrice to move his pen, and I have you.”

“So you  _were_  writing about me?”His hand ran over Tomas’ bare ass, kneaded and squeezed.

“The sunrise, actually.Your ego is grand enough.”Though he’d had some thoughts to turn the sestet to the topic of his lover, if he were honest.

“Maybe I’ll follow you when you go back to Pisa, then, if I’m your Beatrice.You’ll need your muse to keep you from turning too studious.”He kept one hand on Tomas’ waist, but his free hand moved deeper.Slow but insistent, he began to work him open with two fingers.

“Christoforo, I will be studying  _theology_ , I can’t…oh, blessed Virgin that feels amazing…”

“Do you forget my father is a Cardinal, and my mother his second favorite mistress?What use is piety without passion?”He relished the sounds he earned from Tomas and the way he moved in close to accept him; unlike his father, he would never be willing to put his lover aside.

“I would…” but what Tomas would was lost, interrupted as the bells of the Duomo began to clang all together.Christo stole one more kiss, but they were both distracted, looking out the window as though they could see the disturbance.The bells rang on, the alarm to rouse the city, for an outbreak of war or plague or riot.“I have to find my uncles,” Tomas said.“They will know what is happening.”His face pinched with worry as he climbed off, and he shucked his borrowed shirt without taking his eyes off the window.There seemed no point in trying to talk over the racket, but Chris sighed to himself as Tomas began to hunt for his clothes.  

“I’ll go with you,” he said.He shrugged into his rumpled shirt and groped under the bed for his wayward pants.“The streets won’t be safe.”He found his clothes, and more importantly his sword belt.He was making better progress than Tomas, who still stood naked below the waist.He absently tucked curls under his hat, but he focused on the window with his eyes full of dread.

The clangor of bells covered the footsteps that pounded up the stairs until it was too late.Christo had just gotten his pants onto his hips when three men with drawn daggers kicked in the door with a spray of splinters.Tomas froze, his face shocked but not much surprised.

“I wouldn’t if I were you, blondie,” the smallest of the men, his pockmarked face stubbled with a salt and pepper day-old beard, snarled at Christo. Christo stopped drawing his rapier but left his hand on the hilt.Despite his state of dress, his stance was all arrogance, ready for a fight.“Our business isn’t with you.Thought you said the Medici would be alone?” He asked one of the other men, a note of petulance in his voice.

“He’s supposed to be.Lorenzo know you like it in the ass, Choir Boy?”Tomas didn’t rise to the bait, but he tried to warn Christoforo with just his eyes to stay still.The leader had a scar at his mouth, a deep line that drew his upper lip into a cruel sneer and slurred his speech.“The bastard probably gave you your first taste, eh?Who’s your boyfriend,  _leccacazzi_?”

“I’ll tell you who I am, you son of an ugly whore…” Christo lunged for the leader but the third man, the largest of the three, put a dagger to his ribs.

“He’s no one,” Tomas lied.He put his nose up and tried for his Uncle Lorenzo’s easy and imperious countenance.“A paid companion.He means nothing.Let him go and we can settle this like civilized men.”

“He’s lying!Look at this ring!He’s no whore, he’s…” the little bearded man had Christo’s hand, examining the heavy ring he wore as though desperate to see something else.“He’s a fucking Borgia!”He dropped Christo like he held a snake and turned an accusing look at his leader.“Now what do we do?The Albizzi wanted it clean, they aren’t going to want a bloodfeud with another house!”The leader closed his eyes and sighed.

“Well now you’ve said that, we’re going to get it over with and hope Rodrigo doesn’t miss one bastard.They already got Giuliano in the Duomo, and Lorenzo will be dead too.The Borgia wants to be Pope, and he’ll need Albizzi money if the Medici are gone.”

“Leave him alone!Let him go, he won’t say anything.” Tomas doubted that was true, but he begged Christoforo to pretend at least.The leader didn’t answer.He plunged the dagger into Tomas’ belly instead, then again as his blood began to flow in a warm rain.Tomas sank to the ground and thought of his unfinished poems.He could hear his lover screaming his name.This wasn’t right; they completed each other.Their bodies rose and fell together like the lines of a sonnet, but now the form would be broken, never resolved.Another dagger hammered into his back and he turned his head toward Christoforo.He’d lost track of the blows, but he knew what he wanted his last sight to be.The Albizzi assassins stole even this, however; his vision had gone dark and his ears had filled with the black rushing sound of his own death.

He heard the distinctive scrape of a rapier clearing the scabbard and knew a tiny bit of hope that his love had gotten free.

“Christo..for…” he sighed, and died with a smile on his lips.


	2. Chapter 2

It would be more romantic to say that when Christoforo came back from the dead, Tommaso thought he was an angel.Or even a Dante-like spirit guide, a personal Beatrice, as he’d once called him.But Tommaso knew his lover too well, and though his grief had blunted the sharp edges of his memories, they all came rushing back as soon as the familiar blonde head appeared over the edge of his balcony.

 

“Tomas?” he said, only his eyes and forearms showing over the gilded wooden railing.Even the whisper of his name shook him, for he’d never thought anyone would call him that again, never thought he’d hear that faint Spanish lilt.He tried to get up, arms out before he knew it, but he hadn’t moved quickly in months and the effort pulled his scars and left him dizzy.He hadn’t even bothered to cross the room to read in his deep chair in two days, and the pile of books still waited there for him, all except his copy of Dante’s Divina Commedia.He’d thrown that against the wall, wanting to punish the long-dead poet for reminding him of what he’d lost.He felt an absurd rush of guilt as the room swam, and all his facility with words abandoned him.He only gasped, one hand over his hammering heart.

 

“Please don’t scream.It’s Christo.”He swung a leg over the ledge and hauled himself up without his usual grace.He pushed open the tall balcony window and let in a cool, damp breeze as he stepped into view.The only light came from the cloud-veiled moon and the dim embers of the fire, but Tommaso would have known his voice anywhere, and the tall, broad form of his body.Though he stood hunched over and moved with caution, it could only be Christoforo.The dim red light glinted off the room’s only decorations, paintings of the Madonna and Child and his namesake San Tommaso, and though he could only make out their pale faces and the gleam of gilt, he offered them thanks for this answer to his most fervent prayers.

 

“They said you were dead,” Tommaso breathed.

 

“They told me _you_ were dead,” Christoforo said.His clothes were torn and muddy and the fresh scratches on his arms and legs said he’d climbed the rose trellis to reach the bedroom, but he looked far more run down than a quarrel with the gardens would explain.Christo loved clothes, but his shirt was dirty even in the faint glow from the banked fire, stained with spilled wine and food.His hair hung lank and dark around his face and several days worth of beard darkened his chin.Even his beautiful eyes had lost their cocky, easygoing warmth, replaced with the glassy intensity of fevered determination.

 

“I think I almost was,” Tomas admitted.He remembered his last morning with Christoforo, though the golden joy of it cut him like a knife, and then nothing until he awoke from the haze of poppy juice and febrile hallucinations.Since then, his world had shrunk to this little two-room suite in one of his uncle’s least fashionable country retreats, one balcony with a view of the endless October rains, two servants, and a doctor.And of course the letters from his uncle, warm at first but growing more stern as he failed to respond, urging him to get out of bed and rejoin the living.The most recent still lay on his bedside table, where he’d discarded it as one more tie to his old life, to the Tommaso who really had died in a rented room above a Florentine taverna, and therefore no longer of interest to him.Now, though, with Christoforo standing before him, changed, like he was, but alive, it took on the lethal potential menace of a coiled viper, and his eyes darted to it and back as though Christo would somehow glean its contents.The knowledge of what his uncle had written hung over him like a miasma that would sicken them both.

 

“How did you live?I saw you, you were…” Christoforo reached out a trembling hand like he didn’t believe he would touch living flesh.

 

“I don’t know.I can’t remember.I only know my uncle sent me here with a good doctor, and I kept waiting to die, but I never did.”He shifted over in the bed and Christoforo at last took the invitation with a hint of his former confidence.He sat and took his muddy boots off as Tommaso relit the stump of candle, keeping his hand well away from the folded bit of paper as though it would bite him.He forgot his uncle, his pain and grief, even his apprehension when Christoforo leaned into his arms at last.Tommaso sat propped up on his pillows and held him against his chest.Christoforo sighed and relaxed with his ear over Tommaso’s heart, feeling the steady beat in his cheek.Tommaso breathed in his scent, wet soil and cool autumn air over the sour smell of old wine, dried sweat, and ill health.It was not as he remembered, but it still seemed the most precious perfume in the world.He stroked Christo’s hair and his hot, dry brow. Every moment he held Christo in his arms was a prayer answered, but it troubled him to have his lost lover cling to him.“How did you find me?” he asked after a moment.

 

“I’ve been checking every Medici house I could find,” he said.“I learned that your uncle had retained a very expensive surgeon and sent him out here and the rest was a hunch.”He draped over Tommaso, burrowing his face in him, and though his scars pulled and stung, he didn’t want him to stop.

 

“But how did you get in?How did you find my room?”

 

“Oh, that.Let’s just say your kitchen girl has a weakness for blue eyed scoundrels like myself.”Christoforo grinned up at him, and for a moment he was once again the man Tommaso had thought lost in Florence, with a roguish twinkle in his eye.

 

“You came back from the dead just to tell me you’d seduced the maid?Some true love you are,” he teased.

 

“It was only…”

 

“I don’t care what it was.I don’t care what you did.I’ve missed you so, I’d forgive you anything right now.Just say my name.”

 

“Tomas,” he breathed, like God breathing life into Adam’s clay.Tommaso felt his blood quicken and his cock begin to stir.The stuffy heat of his dark bedroom once again felt like golden summer sun.

 

“Say it again,” he pleaded.He had written no poetry since the day Christo died, had thought his muse could only be found still and gray and riddled with worms beneath the earth, but now words began to tumble through his mind.He wanted to describe this feeling of rebirth and reprieve, of prayers answered and miracles witnessed, and he had thought there would never be anything worthy of description ever again.

 

“Tomas,” he said a little louder.Christoforo’s lips were hot and dry on his neck as he kissed his way up to the hollow behind his earlobe.“I missed you so much I thought I would die.”He ran his fingers through Tommaso’s tangled curls and continued to kiss his throat and collarbone.

 

“I thought God had made a mistake, to take you and leave me,” he whispered.“I think it’s rained every day since that morning in Florence.”

 

“I’m a fighter, Tomas,” he said.His fingers undid the buttons of Tomasso’s nightshirt with surprising care; Christoforo was the type of lover to rip clothing that resisted, or he had been.“I’m a fighter, and you are a poet.No mistake there.I would gladly die for you…”

 

“Don’t,” Tommaso begged.Christo stopped kissing and undressing him and held very still.“Don’t talk like that.I want you to live.Take up some safer profession and stay with me,” he said.Again his thoughts flitted to the letter on the table and just as quickly skidded away.

 

“Will you teach me to write poems?”His hands began to move again and Tomas chuckled.

 

“If you like.But what was that line you fed me, just after we met?”

 

“I am a man of action.I live by my hands.Is that it?”

 

“Yes, that’s the one.You were so full of yourself.”Be like that again, he thought.

 

“And you loved me instantly,” Christo said.

 

“Not for your words. Your words are… well, maybe it’s better if I do the writing.But your hands are quite lyrical.”

 

“Just my hands?”

 

“You know I adore every part of you,” Tommaso sighed.He shrugged his nightshirt off, though self-consciousness threw a wet blanket over him.Fever and infection had gnawed away at his body for weeks after the assassination attempt, and the babyish softness of his body that Christoforo had so loved had melted away.He’d only washed with a basin and sponge since his injuries, as well, and he probably smelled musty as an unaired room, like stale rosewater and infirmity.

 

“I had forgotten how beautiful you are,” Christo said, his voice husky with tears and lust.He pulled the blankets away and studied Tommaso’s nude body.

 

“I’m even skinnier than I was before,” Tommaso said, and he looked away from Christoforo and the table by his bed.Christo cupped his jaw in his strong hand and guided his eyes back to meet his gaze.

 

“You are perfect,” he said.The hand trailed down Tommaso’s neck and over his chest, brushed over his nipples and the hollows of his ribs.“But I will have to be sure you get plenty of all the things you like to eat,” he said, with that smile of his that said he knew his crude innuendo should annoy the poet, but would charm him instead.

 

“You are insufferable,” Tommaso started to tell him, but Christoforo was not listening.He had reached the scars on Tomasso’s belly and studied them with an unreadable expression on his face.His fingers drifted over the marks, soft as feathers, first one and then the other.They had healed, but the lines in his skin were still angry red, shiny and puckered.When Tommaso didn’t make a move to stop him, Christo rubbed his thumb over the bigger one (though the smaller scar had been the more serious wound) and his lips parted as though he would speak, but no words came.Instead his kissed them like stigmata, like a holy and miraculous gift instead of simple flesh.

 

“It looks like writing poems might not be the safest career,” he said and though his words were light his tone was somber.He kissed lightly down the hollow of Tommaso’s belly, over the loose skin left where he’d lost weight.He buried his nose in the thick blonde curls at his crotch and steadied Tommaso with a strong hand on each hip.Tommaso gasped as his cock swelled and his vision swam as his blood rushed to meet Christo’s heated mouth.

 

“Christo?What are you doing?You never…do this…” he whispered.Christo took, he never gave himself like this.

 

“Let me do it tonight,” he insisted.He took the tip of Tommaso's cock into his mouth and moved with inexperienced hesitation down the shaft while his tongue made circles around.He began to suck, pressing the head against the roof of his mouth.

 

“Not so hard,” Tommaso told him.“You can go slow,” he said, a gentle echo of their first time together two years ago, when he had been in Christo’s place.He’d been scared half witless to displease his beautiful new lover, so forceful and experienced, and it charmed him to see their roles reversed.He stroked Christo’s hair and guided him to a better position, and Christo relaxed into his performance as he gave himself permission to enjoy it.

 

The sharp-edged months of pain and grief fell away.Their bodies came together, rising and falling like the metrical beat of a sonnet.Phrases of poetry flitted through his mind as they always had when he was with Christoforo.He had abandoned his poems with everything else he thought he’d lost in Florence, and he would have laid them on Christo’s grave in place of roses had he been able to visit it.Still, as he built toward climax, he began to pull together the threads of the ode he’d meant to write, lost not just in the pleasure but in the way he would describe it.

 

He couldn’t last, as his weakened health and long fallow period had ruined his endurance.He bit back on his cry of joy, keeping Christoforo’s name locked behind his lips as he thrust into his mouth.Christoforo released him just before he came and let him spill onto his neck and shirt as white stars danced before his vision.Christoforo coughed a few times, quietly behind his hand, but managed not to gag.

 

“You always made that look so easy,” he murmured.He lay his head on Tomasso’s thigh and stroked up and down the length of his body.

 

“I got a lot of practice,” he said.He lay back, spent, against his pillows and let his breathing return to normal while he watched the red embers in the fireplace.Christo shivered, though his face against Tomasso’s skin was hot.“Shall we see if I still remember how?” he asked, but Christoforo did not respond.

 

“Christo?” he said.He sat up and shook him gently.

 

“Hmmm?” he said.“Let me rest a moment.”

 

“You can rest.Just come here.We should take that shirt off you, at least.”

 

“No.I like it,” he slurred, but he didn’t struggle when Tommaso undid the knots at the collar, and let him pull the damp and filthy thing over his head.He ran his hands over Christoforo’s body and felt something stiff and foul against his chest.He pulled him up to the head of his bed, closer to the light, and frowned.A crude bandage was tied in place against a long gash that ran over his ribs and under his left armpit, and the pad was so crusted with dried gore that it looked black against the enflamed red of his skin.

 

“What did you do to yourself, love?” he whispered, and he was surprised at the strength of his answer.

 

“I _avenged_ you,” he said. He rolled to try to cover the wound.“I started with those butchers from Florence and I moved on to every Albizzi I could reach.”

 

“My Uncle Lorenzo…” he started to say.He hated the way Christoforo’s profession still caught him unaware sometimes, and the way he forgot that his lover was a killer outside their little love nests.

 

“Your uncle paid me for it,” he said.“But I would have done it anyway.No one touches you.No one.Not ever again.”Christoforo subsided and lay burning against his side.

 

“He knew you were alive all this time?”

 

“I guess he played us both.He never wanted us to see each other again.”

 

“My doctor will be here in the morning,” Tommaso said.He had no idea how he would bribe the man to keep this from his uncle, but he couldn’t send Christo back out into the rainy night.“He’ll fix you up.”He stroked Christo’s dirty hair back from his forehead and thought about his Uncle Lorenzo.When he thought Christoforo had fallen into a doze, he leaned over to put out the light.

 

“I have some more bad news, Tomas,” Christoforo murmured, though he did not open his eyes.

 

“What’s that?” He snuffed the flame and it went out, leaving them with only the red light of the dying fire.

 

“You are stuck with me for good now.”

 

“Am I?”

 

“Afraid so.I promised, you see.”

 

“What did you promise?”

 

“I promised the Blessed Virgin that if she healed you, if I could see you one more time, I would never touch another lover.”His kiss was gentle and rough with stubble against Tomasso’s cheek.“It’s only you, Tomas, only you for the rest of my days.”

 

“I’ll hold you to that, even if she doesn’t,” he said as he held him, though tears tracked down his face, unseen.He lay in the dark and thought of the letter on the table.How could he tell Christoforo that he was, according to his uncle, already engaged?

 


End file.
